Virtually, every system in the IT infrastructure exposes the activity being carried out by it, using logging. Log files are the primary source of finding out the various aspects of a system. A developer checks the log files to see if the program he or she developed is running as expected. The various flows of execution of a program are inspected by the log records written to the log file by the program. An administrator of a system checks the log files to see the reasons an application is failing to execute as required. Log files provide the administrator with the first-step-information on what is going wrong with the application. Numerous examples could be stated mentioning the scenarios where log files help developers, administrators, or even customers, under various circumstances, such as problem determination.
The log files grow to huge sizes over time and severely hamper the effective usage of them. People and applications that use the log files, for analysis of the activity carried out by the system, find it difficult to search for the necessary sections in the logs due to the sheer size of the logs. Various kinds of applications and tools are available today that are developed primarily with the notion of using log files to help in problem determination, searching of log records, filtering relevant log records, analyze the flow of the program, generate aggregate reports of the log records, and etc.
These applications, however, do not reduce the amount of data that is recorded in the log files, and also, their performance deteriorates with the increase in the size of log files. Thus, it would be beneficial to create a logging mechanism to reduce the size of log files; however, not compromising on the amount of information that is recorded to the log files. The disclosure described helps to reduce the amount of data written to the log files without losing on the information content. Moreover, it helps in easy identification of the failure sections from the log records by keeping a central repository of the log records.